When Martha Mims was a little girl, she used to go every spring with her mother, grandmother and aunt to Mt. Pleasant Methodist Church near Caledonia for “church cleaning day.”

“We would leave early in the morning,” Mims remembered. “It was just a day-long affair. We would sweep down cobwebs and sweep up these lady bugs, dust the pews. I can remember oiling the railing around the pulpit.

“I can also remember being tempted to lay my dust rag down and go play the piano,” she added in a whisper. “Until I was called back into service. But that was a nice break.”

This week, Mims again found herself sweeping lady bugs out of the sanctuary and dusting the backs of the pews and drawing hymns out of the slightly out-of-tune piano — this time in preparation for today’s Palm Sunday union service for Caledonia United Methodist Church, Flint Hill United Methodist Church and Mims’ home church Mt. Zion Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

It’s unique, Mims said, because apart from the annual Homecoming service and the occasional wedding, the building doesn’t host church services anymore, much less services for multiple churches and denominations. The one-room building is more than 100 years old — estimates have it being built in the 1880s or 1890s — and is still in the same condition it was then. No electricity, no running water. Mims said in the spring, sometimes the best way to heat it is to open the sanctuary doors wide and let the sunshine in.

‘It was not used, but it wasn’t abandoned’

Mt. Pleasant isn’t the oldest church building in Lowndes County, said local historian Carolyn Kaye — but it may be one of the oldest in the state to remain more or less in its original condition. And it’s certainly one of the oldest in such good shape.

“It’s very unusual,” she said. “The fact that it’s still standing is a miracle.”

Most old church buildings that survive have more space and modern upgrades, Kaye said. Even after regular services stopped being held there, enough of the family members of the last congregation cared about it to preserve it.

The history of the church itself is goes back even farther. Established in 1833, its members included William Walker Nielson, a veteran of the War of 1812 who marched into Columbus with Andrew Jackson’s army along Military Road before it was called Military Road, Kaye said. The church is also connected with the original owners of The Cedars on Military Road, the oldest house in Lowndes County.

Mims is part of that history, too.

“I’m Presbyterian, but the Vaughn family (which helped found the church) was my family,” she said. “That’s where my roots are. So I’m just one of the many people who have taken care of this facility.”

Kaye became aware of the building’s history more than 10 years ago when there was a push from people like Mims to have the building put on the National Register of Historic Places.

“My late husband, Sam Kaye, was a preservation architect and we did go out there and look at it,” Kaye said. “We didn’t do any work on it, of course. It didn’t need it.”

The registration form submitted to National Park Service notes the church building is one of the few remaining examples of Carpenter Gothic style in a rural wooden church, thanks to its steeply pitched roof and gables and pointed-arch windows. What restoration there has been include foundational work and replacing the wooden door with a metal one for security purposes.

“They did a lot of restoration work,” Kaye said. “That’s what Sam was helping with in giving advice, but it was in such good shape, it really didn’t need a lot because they had kept it up.

“It was never abandoned totally,” she added. “It was not used, but it wasn’t abandoned.”

Planning today’s service

Mims said she came up with the idea for a union service last November with Charity Gordon, minister of Caledonia and Flint Hill Methodist churches, which were on the same circuit as Mt. Pleasant before it became inactive in 1981.

“She was new to the community,” Mims said. “So I just introduced myself and wanted her to become aware of this little Methodist history right here. From that, then, we thought, ‘Why don’t we have a worship service there?’ We took it to our three churches and all of them said that they anticipated it would be a wonderful experience.”

After some back-and-forth, they settled on Palm Sunday for the date, reasoning most people would want to be at their home churches for Easter and that holy days around Christmas were too cold to hold a service in a church without electricity.

So today children will walk through the sanctuary waving palm branches and Mims will again sit at the piano and play hymns — all dating back to the 1800s, she added, songs church goers 150 years ago would have heard on Sunday morning. The offering gathered will go to help preserve the building, she said.

But it’s not just the history of the building that’s special, she said.

“I just think this is a wonderful example of how churches are coming together in a time when there’s so much divisiveness in our nation and even in our churches,” she said.

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